Rants & Raves is a sign of intelligent life, simulating good debate. Sadly, the Javits Plaza debate was a shouting match. Martha Schwartz's self-righteous sarcasm, Clare Cooper-Marcus's dismissiveness - and these are some of the profession's better writers!

Shouting starts when a debate is mis-framed. At Javits Plaza, artist's rights vs. public rights were apparent issues, mis-framed by two presumptions which our profession seldom questions. The first: that iconoclasm is necessary and sufficient for great design. The second: that only functionality can justify public design.

Schwartz equates creativity with iconoclasm as if newness never produced disaster. Cooper-Marcus derides non-functional design, fashionably but thoughtlessly, as "Disneyland." Jory Johnson accuses Cooper-Marcus of relegating art to the "merely visual."

Apparently opposed, functionalism and iconoclasm conspire to deprive visual pleasure of any legitimacy. As Luis Barragan plaintively noted, beauty is more and more absent from the discourses of design.

Yes, function is important, but not exclusively. Yes, art succeeds best when it is challenging. But iconoclasm is only one way to challenge people's creativity. New connections among well-known givens are often highly creative, far from being automatically "bland and faceless."

The privileging of iconoclasm over all other creative goals has itself become an icon. Claiming that artists must "push the culture" resurrects the discredited Myth of Progress, whose defense almost requires mudslinging, e.g. comparing Cooper-Marcus to Jesse Helms.

For landscape architects, iconoclasm raises a special concern. The forms of the more-than-human landscape reflect the dynamics that keep the earth alive; our love of those forms reflects the fact that the earth keeps us alive. Smashing these "icons" just to tweak Olmsted's nose is pathetic. Iconoclasts attack the desire for beauty as complacency; functionalists attack it as a luxury; and they attack one another (I have to assume) to demonstrate the passionate depth of their narrowness.

Kim Sorvig is a research assistant professor in the School of Architecture & Planning at the University of New Mexico.

Landscape Beautiful

I was interested to read Landscape Architecture Criticism (Fall Winter 1997) because I had just read Frank Waugh's essay on the subject in his book, Landscape Beautiful, written in 1910. [John Stilgoe will be reviewing Landscape Beautiful in an upcoming issue of Land Forum.] Waugh was one of landscape architecture's great early promoters, even though it wasn't his first discipline. When the Massachusetts Agricultural College asked him to start a landscape program, Waugh undertook a self-study of the field that included correspondence with landscape architects around the country to learn about built works. He was disappointed with the results because so many were reticent about giving information, let alone expressing any opinions.

Waugh understood the importance of criticism in the arts. He considered landscape architecture to be an art, and believed that a critical framework would help to raise standards and promote the field. "Well-informed, intelligent criticism will clear the air, will set a standard of taste, will foster a wider and better appreciation of our gracious art, will tend to the improvement of technique, will set higher ideals before our professional workers..." Lack of criticism represented a great handicap, and Waugh was puzzled by the almost "organized opposition" to it from the field, which we might recognize today. But he was also optimistic that landscape architecture would outgrow this in time.

So have we covered any ground since 1910? I believe that we no longer need to justify landscape architectural criticism, but we do need more venues and readers to earn the legitimacy that is part of the call for critical frameworks. The recent article in Landscape Architecture about conflicts between art and landscape architecture on college campuses in San Diego and Oregon was disturbing. The question of how we respond to conflicts like these is part of the concern over theory and criticism. We need to conduct our critical dialogue where it matters, and that might mean outside the field, beyond a self-selected group of colleagues.

Ellen Jouret-Epstein is currently a student in the MLA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

FDR Memorial

I'm just back from several weeks away and can't take the opportunity to comment on the Rant and Raves article. I did have a chance to read it (albeit quickly) and loved it all and am glad it's evoking critical thinkers.

Lawrence Halprin is a landscape architect whose international practice includes the recently completed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC.